The invention relates to a blank for the production of dental shaped bodies, the blank comprising a corpus of dental restoration material, from which the shaped body can be carved with the aid of a tool adapted to cause removal of material, the blank comprising a coding means incorporating at least one structure as an information carrier for characteristics of the blank corpus, the position, dimensions, or nature of the structure being detectable by scanning or measuring the blank. The invention further relates to a method of producing a dental shaped body from a blank comprising a corpus of dental restoration material with the aid of a tool adapted to cause removal of material, provision being made for a contacting operation of the tool on the blank corpus for detecting the position of the blank corpus.
In order to carve a dental shaped body from a blank by the removal of material, the shaped body to be carved must be entirely enclosed within the corpus of the blank. For optimization of the machining process, it is advantageous when the blank is one selected from a plurality of blanks having corpuses of various sizes, since the volume of the blank corpus to be made available can then be one suitable for the shaped body to be produced. Since every blank corpus is larger than the shaped body, it is advantageous to orient the shaped body within the blank corpus in such a way that the machining process can be optimized. For example, a shaped body can be placed in an oblong blank at the outer end of the blank corpus in order to reduce the volume of material to be removed.